The JPEG Experiment

I recently travelled to Arizona, and I spent pretty much the whole time in the beautiful western desert around Parker. For this trip, I decided to try something different in terms of picture taking - I only shot in JPEG, no RAW. Part of it was due to me being lazy and not feeling like dragging my laptop along (it has my RAW conversion software program on it), and part of it was simple curiosity - I was curious if I'd actually be able to notice poorer quality in the end-result images. I do realize that the RAW capture in a camera writes the information directly to the card, bypassing the camera's processor... so in essence you have an unprocessed 'negative'... and of course you should see better results if you have more data to play with right from the start. But post-processing of RAW files takes substantially more effort than tweaking JPEG files - I'd say it consumes at least twice as much time per picture - and I have been wondering lately if all my efforts have been a bit in vain.
I guess since I didn't take anything in RAW, I don't have actual hard evidence to make a side-by-side comparison... But in my infinite yet limited photography wisdom, I would have to say that straight JPEGs do look somewhat less... crisp? for lack of a better term... and I am unable to enlarge them to the extent that I can with RAW format files, without noticing massive pixelation and loss of integrity. As well, any editing that is required degrades the file exponentially with every overwrite.
So, to make a long story no shorter than it was... I'll be leaving my camera set to RAW... I'll continue to spend more time than I wish was necessary on photo processing... and I will not complain about it!

Next question: PEF or DNG? Aaaack!! So many queries, so little time!